Scientists find world’s oldest European hedgehog

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

 

IMAGE: DR SOPHIE LUND RASMUSSEN LOOKS IN THE MICROSCOPE TO COUNT YEAR RINGS IN A SECTION OF A HEDGEHOG JAWBONE TO DETERMINE THE AGE OF THE HEDGEHOG. CREDIT: THOMAS DEGNER. view more 

CREDIT: DR SOPHIE LUND RASMUSSEN LOOKS IN THE MICROSCOPE TO COUNT YEAR RINGS IN A SECTION OF A HEDGEHOG JAWBONE TO DETERMINE THE AGE OF THE HEDGEHOG. CREDIT: THOMAS DEGNER.

The world’s oldest scientifically-confirmed European hedgehog has been found in Denmark by a citizen science project involving hundreds of volunteers. The hedgehog lived for 16 years, 7 years longer than the previous record holder.

The European hedgehog is one of our most beloved mammals but populations have declined dramatically in recent years. In the UK, studies indicate that urban populations have fallen by up to 30% and rural populations by at least 50% since the turn of the century (British Hedgehog Preservation Society). To combat this, researchers and conservationists have launched various projects to monitor hedgehog populations, to inform initiatives to protect hedgehogs in the wild.

During 2016, Danish citizens were asked to collect any dead hedgehogs they found for “The Danish Hedgehog Project”, a citizen science project led by Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen (also known as ‘Dr Hedgehog’). The aim was to better understand the state of the Danish hedgehog population by establishing how long hedgehogs typically lived for. Over 400 volunteers collected an astonishing 697 dead hedgehogs originating from all over Denmark, with a roughly 50/50 split from urban and rural areas.

The researchers determined the age of the dead hedgehogs by counting growth lines in thin sections of the hedgehogs’ jawbones, a method similar to counting growth rings in trees. The results have been published as a paper in the journal Animals.

Key findings:

• The oldest hedgehog in the sample was 16 years old - the oldest scientifically documented European hedgehog ever found. Two other individuals lived for 13 and 11 years respectively. The previous record holder lived for 9 years.
• Despite these long-lived individuals, the average age of the hedgehogs was only around two years. About a third (30%) of the hedgehogs died at or before the age of one year.
• Most (56%) of the hedgehogs had been killed when crossing roads. 22% died at a hedgehog rehabilitation centre (for instance, following a dog attack), and 22% died of natural causes in the wild.
• Male hedgehogs in general lived longer than females (2.1 vs 1.6 years, or 24% longer), which is uncommon in mammals. But male hedgehogs were also more likely to be killed in traffic. This may be because males have larger ranges than females and likely move over larger areas, bringing them into contact more frequently with roads.
• For both male and female hedgehogs, road deaths peaked during the month of July, which is the height of the mating season for hedgehogs in Denmark. This is likely because hedgehogs walk long distances and cross more roads in their search for mates.

Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen (based at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit WildCRU, Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and affiliated researcher at Aalborg University), who leads The Danish Hedgehog Project, said: ’Although we saw a high proportion of individuals dying at the age of one year, our data also showed that if the individuals survived this life stage, they could potentially live to become 16 years old and produce offspring for several years. This may be because individual hedgehogs gradually gain more experience as they grow older. If they manage to survive to reach the age of two years or more, they would have likely learned to avoid dangers such as cars and predators.’

She added: ‘The tendency for males to outlive females is likely caused by the fact that it is simply easier being a male hedgehog. Hedgehogs are not territorial, which means that the males rarely fight. And the females raise their offspring alone.’

Hedgehog jaw bones show growth lines because calcium metabolism slows down when they hibernate over winter. This causes bone growth to reduce markedly or even stop completely, resulting in growth lines where one line represents one hibernation. 

The researchers also took tissue samples to investigate whether the degree of inbreeding influenced how long European hedgehogs live for. Previous studies have found that the genetic diversity of the Danish hedgehog population is low, indicating high degrees of inbreeding. This can reduce the fitness of a population by allowing hereditary, and potentially lethal, health conditions to be passed on between generations. Surprisingly, the results showed that inbreeding did not seem to reduce the expected lifespan of the hedgehogs.

Dr Rasmussen said: ‘Sadly, many species of wildlife are in decline, which often results in increased inbreeding, as the decline limits the selection of suitable mates. This study is one of the first thorough investigations of the effect of inbreeding on longevity. Our research indicates that if the hedgehogs manage to survive into adulthood, despite their high degree of inbreeding, which may cause several potentially lethal, hereditary conditions, the inbreeding does not reduce their longevity. That is a rather groundbreaking discovery, and very positive news from a conservation perspective.’

Dr Rasmussen added: ‘The various findings of this study have improved our understanding of the basic life history of hedgehogs, and will hopefully improve the conservation management for this beloved and declining species.’

The study was published in collaboration with Associate Professor Owen Jones at Interdisciplinary Center on Population Dynamics (CPop), Institute of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Senior Researcher Dr Thomas Bjørneboe Berg from Naturama, and Associate Professor Helle Jakobe Martens, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Copenhagen University.

Hedgehog jawbones which are used for age determination research. A hedgehog’s age can be worked out by counting year rings in sections of their jawbones. 

Credit: Sophie Lund Rasmussen

388 hedgehog jaws being prepared for age determination investigation. 

Credit: Sophie Lund Rasmussen.

Overview of stained sections of hedgehog jaws, showing year rings which allows the researchers to determine the age of the hedgehogs. 

Credit: Thomas Bjørneboe Berg.

The study ’Anyone Can Get Old—All You Have to Do Is Live Long Enough: Understanding Mortality and Life Expectancy in European Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus)’ has been published in Animals: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/13/4/626

You can learn more about Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen’s work on her YouTube channel ‘Dr Hedgehog’: https://www.youtube.com/@drhedgehog

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the seventh year running, and ​number 2 in the QS World Rankings 2022. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 200 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past three years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

The Department of Biology is a University of Oxford department within the Maths, Physical and Life Sciences Division. It utilises academic strength in a broad range of bioscience disciplines to tackle global challenges such as food security, biodiversity loss, climate change and global pandemics. It also helps to train and equip the biologists of the future through holistic undergraduate and graduate courses. For more information visit www.biology.ox.ac.uk

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JOURNAL

Animals

DOI

10.3390/ani13040626 

ARTICLE TITLE

Anyone Can Get Old—All You Have to Do Is Live Long Enough: Understanding Mortality and Life Expectancy in European Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus)

CRAFT BEER

The perfect pour: model predicts beer head features

Researchers take on the myriad complex questions of beer foam dynamics, pointing to more precise brewing and nozzle manufacturing

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

 

IMAGE: BEER FOAM FORMATION SIDE VIEWS AT TIMES T=1.50S AND 4.10S. view more 

CREDIT: TIZIAN BAUER AND WENJING LYU

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 2023 – From creating drinks with distinctive looks to providing aromas for connoisseurs, beer foam is big business. The complex interplay between the components of a beer, the vessel from which it’s poured, and the glass it’s poured into has garnered plenty of attention from researchers, brewers, and drinkers. A new study looks to provide the most accurate predictions for how a beer will foam.

Researchers have analyzed brewing with numerical simulations to predict an array of beer foam features. Publishing their work in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, Lyu et al. demonstrate that their model can determine foam patterns, heights, stability, beer/foam ratio, and foam volume fractions.

The study presents the first use of a computational approach called a multiphase solver to tackle beer heads.

“Simulation of a bottom-up pouring process using a multiphase solver is a complex task that involves modeling the physical and chemical interactions that occur during the process, such as fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, and chemical reactions,” said author Wenjing Lyu. “By using a multiphase solver, it is possible to accurately predict the behavior of the system and optimize the design of the nozzle outlets and the cup geometry to ensure the fastest possible bottom-up pouring under various conditions such as pressure, temperature, and carbonation.”

To tackle this task, the group partnered with Einstein 1, a startup developing a new bottom-up tapping system in which the nozzle pushes up a movable magnet on the bottom of a glass to create a temporary inlet. As the glass fills, the magnet moves back into place and the beverage is ready to drink. After repeatability studies to establish stable pouring conditions, they assembled a model that was then validated with experiments.

The group found that foam from Einstein 1’s tapping system is generated only in the first moments of pouring. Higher temperatures and pressures yielded more foam.

After that, beer’s liquid phase kicked in. Determined in large part by bubble size, the beer’s foam phase slowly decayed, taking approximately 25 times longer to fully fizzle out than it took the foam to form.

Alongside further optimizing their computational approaches, the group next looks to study the effects of nozzle shapes.

“This will help in controlling foam formation, reducing consumption and pouring time, and improving the overall efficiency of the pouring process,” Lyu said. “By accurately simulating the foaming process, our model can help to improve the quality of the final product, reduce costs, and increase productivity in industries such as food and beverage, chemical, and others.”

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The article “Experimental and numerical investigation of beer foam” is authored by Wenjing Lyu, Tizian Bauer, Bernhard Gatternig, Antonio Delgado, and Thomas Erling Schellin. It will appear in Physics of Fluids on Feb. 14, 2023 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0132657). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0132657.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex fluids. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/phf.

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JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids

DOI

10.1063/5.0132657 

ARTICLE TITLE

Experimental and numerical investigation of beer foam

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Feb-2023

Discovery could lead to new fungicides to protect rice crops

How the rice blast fungus enters leaves makes it vulnerable to spray-on chemical blockers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY

 

IMAGE: BLAST DISEASE DESTROYS BETWEEN 10% AND 35% OF THE WORLD’S RICE HARVEST EACH YEAR. A NEW DISCOVERY COULD LEAD TO FUNGICIDES THAT BLOCK THE PATHOGEN, MAGNAPORTHE ORYZAE, FROM ENTERING THE LEAVES. THIS PHOTO OF A HEALTHY RICE FIELD WAS TAKEN IN CHENGDU, CHINA, IN 2019. view more 

CREDIT: NICK TALBOT, THE SAINSBURY LAB

A fungus that plagues rice crops worldwide gains entry to plant cells in a way that leaves it vulnerable to simple chemical blockers, a discovery that could lead to new fungicides to reduce the substantial annual losses of rice and other valuable cereals.

Each year, blast disease, caused by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae, attacks and kills plants that represent between 10% and 35% of the global rice crop, depending on weather conditions.

University of California, Berkeley, biochemists led by Michael Marletta, professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology, discovered that the fungus secretes an enzyme that punches holes in the tough outer layer of rice leaves. Once inside, the fungus rapidly grows and inevitably kills the plant.

In a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marletta and his colleagues describe the structure of the enzyme and how it works to help the fungus invade plants. Because the enzyme is secreted onto the surface of the rice leaf, a simple spray could be effective in destroying the enzyme’s ability to digest the wall of the plant. The scientists are now screening chemicals to find ones that block the enzyme.

“The estimates are that if you could knock out this fungus, you could feed 60 million more people in the world,” said Marletta, the Choh Hao and Annie Li Chair in the Molecular Biology of Diseases at UC Berkeley. “This enzyme is a unique target. Our hope here is that we'll screen to find some unique chemicals and spin out a company to develop inhibitors for this enzyme.”

This target is one of a family of enzymes called polysaccharide monooxygenases (PMO) that Marletta and his UC Berkeley colleagues discovered a little over 10 years ago in another, more widespread fungus, Neurospora. Polysaccharides are sugar polymers that include starch as well as the tough fibers that make plants sturdy, including cellulose and lignin. The PMO enzyme breaks cellulose into smaller pieces, making the polysaccharide susceptible to other enzymes, such as cellulases, and speeding up the breakdown of plant fibers.

“There is an urgent need for more sustainable control strategies for rice blast disease, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa," said Nicholas Talbot, who is Marletta's colleague and co-author, a plant disease expert and executive director of The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich in the United Kingdom. "Given the importance of the polysaccharide monooxygenase to plant infection, it may be a valuable target for developing new chemistries that could be applied at much lower doses than existing fungicides and with less potential environmental impact. It might also be a target for completely chemical-free approaches, too, such as gene silencing.”

Marletta and UC Berkeley Ph.D students Will Beeson and Chris Phillips were originally interested in these enzymes because they degrade plant cellulose much more quickly than other previously described enzymes and thus had potential to turn biomass into sugar polymers that can be fermented more readily into biofuels. Fungi use PMOs to provide a source of food.

He and UC Berkeley colleagues subsequently found hints that some fungal PMOs may do more than merely turn cellulose into food. These PMOs were turned on in the early stages of infection, implying that they’re important in the infection process rather than providing food.

That’s what Marletta, Talbot and their colleagues found. Led by postdoctoral fellow Alejandra Martinez-D’Alto, the UC Berkeley scientists biochemically characterized this unique PMO, called MoPMO9A, while Talbot and UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Xia Yan showed that knocking out the enzyme reduced infection in rice plants.

Marletta and his UC Berkeley colleagues have found similar PMOs in fungi that attack grapes, tomatoes, lettuce and other major crops, which means the new findings may have broad application against plant fungal diseases.

“It isn't just rice that small molecule inhibitors could be used against. They could be widely used against a variety of different crop pathogens,” Marletta said. “I think the future for this, in terms of drug development for plant pathogens, is pretty exciting, which is why we are going to pursue both the fundamental science of it, like we always do, and try to put together pieces to spin it out as a company.”

Damage to rice leaves from rice blast disease.

CREDIT

Nicholas Talbot, The Sainsbury Lab

Biofuels lead way to attacking fungal pathogen

Marletta specializes in identifying and studying new and unusual enzymes in human cells. But 10 years ago, when people got excited about biofuels as a way to address climate change, he was awarded a grant from UC Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute to search for enzymes in other life forms that digest plant cellulose faster than the enzymes known at the time. The goal was to turn tough cellulose fibers into short-chain polysaccharides that yeast could ferment into fuel.

“I said to two of my first-year graduate students, Chris Phillips and Will Beeson, ‘You know, there's got to be organisms out there that eat cellulose fast,’” Marletta said. “Those are the ones we want to find, because we know the enzymes that eat it slow, and they're not particularly useful in a biotechnology sense because they're slow.”

Phillips and Beeson succeeded in finding fast-acting enzymes in a common fungus, Neurospora, which is among the first fungi to attack dead trees after a fire and does a quick job of digesting wood for nutrients. They isolated the enzyme responsible, the first known PMO, and described how it worked. Since then, Marletta’s students have identified 16,000 varieties of PMO, most in fungi, but some in wood-eating bacteria. To date, these have had some success in speeding the production of biofuels as part of a cocktail of other enzymes, though they haven’t made biofuels competitive with other fuels.

But Marletta was intrigued by a small subset of these 16,000 varieties that seemed to do more than provide nutrition for fungi. MoPMO9A, in particular, had an amino acid segment that binds to chitin, a polysaccharide that forms the outer coat of fungi, but is not found in rice. And though all PMOs are secreted, MoPMO9A was secreted during the infectious cycle of the fungus.

Studies subsequently showed that Magnaporthe concentrates MoPMO9A in a pressurized infection cell, called the appressorium, from which it is secreted onto the plant, with one portion of the enzyme binding to the outside of the fungus. The other end of the enzyme has a copper atom embedded in its center. When the fungus slaps the loose end of the enzyme onto the rice leaf, the copper atom catalyzes a reaction with oxygen to break cellulose fibers, helping the fungus breach the leaf surface and invade the entire leaf.

“We were curious: ‘Hey, why does this enzyme have a chitin-binding domain if it's supposed to be working on cellulose?’” according to Marletta. “And that's when we thought, ‘Well, maybe it's secreted, but it sticks to the fungus. That way, when the fungus is sitting on the plant, it can have between it and the leaf the catalytic domain to punch the hole into the leaf.’”

That proved to be the case. Marletta and Talbot are now testing other pathogens that produce PMOs to see if they use the same trick to enter and infect leaves. If so — Marletta is confident that they do — it opens avenues to attack them with a spray-on fungicide, as well.

“The only place you find PMOs like this is in plant pathogens that have to gain access to their host. So, they're almost certainly going to be working the same way,” Marletta said. “I think the scope of work to develop inhibitors to this particular PMO is going to be well beyond rice, even though that itself is pretty important. We're going to be able to use them in other important crop plants.”

Other co-authors of the paper are Alejandra Martinez-D’Alto, Tyler Detomasi, Richard Sayler and William Thomas of UC Berkeley. Marletta is a member of the Berkeley branch of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (CHE-1904540, MCB-1818283) and the National Institutes of Health (F32-GM143897).

A field in China damaged by rice blast disease.

CREDIT

Nicholas Talbot, The Sainsbury Lab

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2215426120 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

Characterization of a unique polysaccharide monooxygenase from the plant pathogen <italic>Magnaporthe oryzae</italic>

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Feb-2023

Acceleration of global sea level rise imminent past 1.8℃ planetary warming

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUTE FOR BASIC SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: SEA LEVEL RISE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ANTARCTIC AND GREENLAND ICE SHEETS, AND MAPS OF PROJECTED 2150 CE ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET SURFACE ELEVATION FOLLOWING DIFFERENT GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSION SCENARIOS (SSP1-1.9, STRONG EMISSION CUTS; SSP2-4.5, MEDIUM EMISSION CUTS; SSP5-8.5, WEAK EMISSION CUTS). view more 

CREDIT: INSTITUTE FOR BASIC SCIENCE JUN-YOUNG PARK

A study published in Nature Communications by an international team of scientists shows that an irreversible loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and a corresponding rapid acceleration of sea level rise, may be imminent if global temperature change cannot be stabilized below 1.8°C, relative to the preindustrial levels.

Coastal populations worldwide are already bracing for rising seas. However, planning for counter-measures to prevent inundation and other damages has been extremely difficult since the latest climate model projections presented in the 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not agree on how quickly the major ice sheets will respond to global warming.

Melting ice sheets are potentially the largest contributor to sea level change, and historically the hardest to predict because the physics governing their behavior is notoriously complex. “Moreover, computer models that simulate the dynamics of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica often do not account for the fact that ice sheet melting will affect ocean processes, which, in turn, can feed back onto the ice sheet and the atmosphere,” says Jun Young Park, PhD student at the IBS Center for Climate Physics and Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea and first author of the study.

Using a new computer model, which captures for the first time the coupling between ice sheets, icebergs, ocean and atmosphere, the team of climate researchers found that an ice sheet/sea level run-away effect can be prevented only if the world reaches net zero carbon emissions before 2060.

“If we miss this emission goal, the ice sheets will disintegrate and melt at an accelerated pace, according to our calculations. If we don’t take any action, retreating ice sheets would continue to increase sea level by at least 100 cm within the next 130 years. This would be on top of other contributions, such as the thermal expansion of ocean water” says Prof. Axel Timmermann, co-author of the study and Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics.

Ice sheets respond to atmospheric and oceanic warming in delayed and often unpredictable ways. Previously, scientists have highlighted the importance of subsurface ocean melting as a key process, which can trigger runaway effects in the major marine based ice sheets in Antarctica. “However, according to our supercomputer simulations, the effectiveness of these processes may have been overestimated in recent studies,” says Prof. June Yi Lee from the IBS Center for Climate Physics and Pusan National University and co-author of the study. “We see that sea ice and atmospheric circulation changes around Antarctica also play a crucial role in controlling the amount of ice sheet melting with repercussions for global sea level projections,” she adds.

The study highlights the need to develop more complex earth system models, which capture the different climate components, as well as their interactions. Furthermore, new observational programs are needed to constrain the representation of physical processes in earth system models, in particular from highly active regions, such as Pine Island glacier in Antarctica.

“One of the key challenges in simulating ice sheets is that even small-scale processes can play a crucial role in the large-scale response of an ice sheet and for the corresponding sea-level projections. Not only do we have to include the coupling of all components, as we did in our current study, but we also need to simulate the dynamics at the highest possible spatial resolution using some of the fastest supercomputers,” summarizes Axel Timmermann.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-36051-9 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Future sea-level projections with a coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice-sheet model

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Feb-2023

Chicken of the sea

Due to their feed, chicken and farmed salmon have remarkably similar environmental footprints

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

We love our chicken. We love our salmon. Thanks to how we farm these two popular proteins, their environmental footprints are surprisingly similar.

The key is in the feed, said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Ben Halpern, director of UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and an author of a paper that appears in the journal Current Biology. In an effort to tease out opportunities for reducing the substantial environmental pressures of global food production, he and an international team of colleagues took a deep look at how we raise these two highly popular animals for consumption, focusing in particular on dynamics between land and sea.

“Chicken are fed fish from the ocean, just as are salmon, and salmon are fed crop products like soy, just as are chicken,” Halpern said, in comparing  industrially farmed broiler chickens, and farmed salmonids (salmon, marine trout and char). In addition to land-based crops, chickens are fed fishmeal and fish oil; while salmon, which typically eat other fish, are farmed with land-based feed, such as oil crops, soybeans and wheat. “In a sense,” he noted, “we really do have ‘chicken of the sea.’”

The researchers found that 95% of the cumulative environmental footprint of these two items (greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, freshwater use and spatial disturbance) is concentrated on less than 5% of the planet, with 85.5% spatial overlap between the two products, due mostly to shared feed ingredients. According to the study, the total cumulative pressures from chicken production is highest in the United States, China and Brazil.

For fish, the highest cumulative pressures are found off the coasts of Chile, Mexico and China, with some pressure on land due to salmon aquaculture. Additionally, the researchers found that while chicken has nine times the environmental footprint of farmed salmon, it has 55 times more production than salmon, an efficiency due largely to the very fast reproductive cycle of chickens — six to eight weeks to reach slaughter weight versus one to two years for salmon.

Within that 5% of the planet that bears the environmental pressures of chicken and salmon production, there are variations in the farming methods’ environmental efficiencies. In the case of chicken, for instance, the U.S. (the world’s top producer of chicken) and Brazil (second largest) are more efficient than China (third largest). There are also variations between environmental pressures relative to the amount of salmon produced that differ by geography, indicating opportunities to improve efficiencies while minimizing environmental impacts.

Chicken and salmon are among the most popular sources of protein, and according to the researchers, are relatively environmentally efficient in comparison to other animal protein production such as beef and pork. However, the magnitude of their production, and their overlap in terms of environmental footprint raises interesting questions about the subtle connections between marine and land protein production, which, in turn, could provide opportunities for promoting sustainability. At the same time, the study  underscores the importance of integrating food policies across realms and sectors to advance food system sustainability, according to the researchers.

“We got really interested in understanding how these two critically important and dominant foods affect our planet and how they compare,” Halpern said. “I knew from past research I’ve been part of that what we feed animals is a key part of what determines their environmental footprint, but I really didn’t expect chicken and farmed salmon to be so similar. The old adage that ‘we are what we eat’ applies to farm animals too!”

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

Study reveals biodiversity engine for fishes: shifting water depth

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

New Haven, Conn. — Fish, the most biodiverse vertebrates in the animal kingdom, present evolutionary biologists a conundrum: The greatest species richness is found in the world’s tropical waters, yet the fish groups that generate new species most rapidly inhabit colder climates at higher latitudes.

A new Yale study helps to explain this paradox. The researchers discovered that the ability of fish in temperate and polar ecosystems to transition back and forth from shallow to deep water triggers species diversification.

Their findings, published Feb. 11 in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that as climate change warms the oceans at higher latitudes, it will impede the evolution of fish species.

“The fish clades contributing the most fish diversity in today’s oceans are leveraging the water column and the ocean depths, in particular, to diversify,” said lead author Sarah T. Friedman, who conducted the research while a G. Evelyn Hutchinson postdoctoral associate at Yale. “Fishes that make these forays into the deep ocean are almost exclusively located in high latitudes, where it’s easier to move along the water column. These regions are experiencing the most drastic warming due to climate change, which threatens to disrupt speciation by making it more difficult for fish to change depths.”

Friedman, now a research fish biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, coauthored the study with Martha Muñoz, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and an assistant curator of vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

For the study, the researchers analyzed existing data on the global species occurrence of 4,067 fish species that included information on species geographic range and speciation rate. In part, their analysis modeled how often fish lineages might be expected to transition across ocean depths. By laying out a distribution of anticipated shifts in depth, the researchers could compare the number of observed transitions in specific lineages. They found that species-rich, high-latitude lineages — eelpouts, rockfishes, flatfishes, icefishes, and snailfishes — transitioned up and down the water column more often than expected. Meanwhile, hyper-diverse tropical lineages, such as gobies and wrasses, changed depth less frequently than predicted.

Fish clades, evolutionary lineages that share a common ancestor, that can freely disperse along the depth gradient may be more likely to capitalize on novel resources or niches at specific depths and become isolated from other members of their group, the researchers said. This can lead to repeated local adaptation and the evolution of new species.

Many variables can affect a fish’s ability to move between depths, including water temperature, pressure, and light penetration. Friedman and Muñoz suggest that temperature plays an important role in the ability of high-latitude fish clades to transition along the water column. Fish clades that inhabit colder water have an easier time traveling into ocean depths, where water temperature plummets dramatically. By contrast, tropical fish, which spend their lives in warm, shallow waters, face steep thermal barrier to transitioning to the deep ocean, the researchers said.

The existing high biodiversity in tropical waters could be a remnant of the deep past when warmer regions were hotbeds of species generation, but over time, most diversification began occurring closer to the Earth’s poles, they explained.

But this biodiversity engine at higher latitudes is vulnerable to climate change. Since the water profile is so much more uniform at higher latitudes than in the tropics, the fish that inhabit them are physiologically fine-tuned to those environments, Muñoz explained. For them, a one-degree shift in temperature will be physiologically more challenging than for an organism that is more of a thermal generalist.

“As the oceans warm, organisms might face steeper barriers to dispersal across the depth column,” Muñoz said. “Over time, I think we’ll see a slowdown of this engine of biodiversification.”

The study was funded by the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Environmental Postdoctoral Fellowship, which aims to enable creative research collaborations in the environmental sciences at Yale by developing diverse academic excellence at the postdoctoral level.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

11-Feb-2023

Moisture the key to soils’ ability to sequester carbon, Oregon State research shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Soil is the Earth’s second-biggest carbon storage locker after the ocean, and a research collaboration has shown that it’s moisture, not temperature or mineral content, that’s the key to how well the soil carbon warehouse works.

The findings are important for understanding how the global carbon cycle might change as the climate grows more warm and dry, said Oregon State University’s Jeff Hatten, co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Carbon in soil has many functions,” said Hatten, a researcher in the OSU College of Forestry. “It’s a major component of soil organic matter that is important to water and nutrient accessibility for plants, and it’s an energy supply to diverse populations of soil organisms. Climate change may impact soil carbon and threaten these important ecosystem services, as well as soils’ ability to keep carbon out of the atmosphere and mitigate climate change.”

Carbon stored in soil has been estimated to total 2,500 gigatons – roughly three times as much as is in the atmosphere and quadruple the amount in every living thing on Earth combined.

Hatten said earlier research had suggested that soil carbon in wet ecosystems was most vulnerable to shifts in temperature and that changes in moisture represented the larger threat only to soil carbon in dry ecosystems.

“The big takeaway from the new study is that most of the things we thought we knew about soil carbon were wrong,” said Kate Heckman of the U.S. Forest Service, who led the research. “Our initial hypothesis centered on the importance of certain kinds of soil minerals that we assumed were important in carbon persistence, or how long carbon stays in soil. We also thought that temperature patterns across the sites would be a strong regulator of carbon age, but we didn’t see the signals we expected to see associated with either temperature or soil minerology.”

Hatten, Heckman and collaborators from Virginia Tech, Michigan Tech, the University of Colorado and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory looked at 400 soil core samples from 34 sites. The samples were collected by the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, whose goal is to gather long-term data from across North America to aid understanding of how ecosystems are changing.

The cores provide pictures of thousands of unique soil “horizons,” Hatten said – layers of soil showing different characteristics based on age and composition.

“Opening the cores was like seeing different parts of the country through an 8-by-200-millimeter soil snapshot,” said Adrian Gallo, who performed many of the initial core analyses as a doctoral student under Hatten. “It was not uncommon to open up the cores and think, ‘What on Earth is happening here with the colors and rocks and roots?’ And then I’d have to look at aerial imagery, topography maps and soil descriptors from nearby locations to help me understand the landscape history.”

“Our results show that when predicting the response of soil carbon to climate change, particularly at a site in a dry ecosystem, we need to consider the history of climate and soil on that site,” Hatten added.

Researchers performed radiocarbon and molecular composition analyses on the core samples to shed light on the relationship between the abundance and persistence of carbon in soil and the availability of moisture. Ultimately, the scientists divided the core sample sites into being from systems that could be broadly described as having either a humid or arid climate. The division correlated with differences in organic carbon decomposition rates from site to site.

“Soil organic carbon is being considered as one of the more promising carbon capture and sequestration approaches we have, and understanding the role moisture plays in that process is critical to helping us realize that potential,” Heckman said. “My hope is that this study encourages a lot of our science community to examine the role of moisture in the terrestrial carbon cycle.”

The National Science Foundation funded this research.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2210044120 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Moisture-driven divergence in mineral-associated soil carbon persistence

$10 million USDA grant to fuel economic resilience and sustainability in Eastern US forests

Grant and Award Announcement

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: PURDUE UNDERGRADUATE AVERY FESS WORKS IN THE FIELD WITH SONGLIN FEI, PROFESSOR OF FORESTRY AND NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE DEAN’S CHAIR OF REMOTE SENSING. AMONG THE GOALS OF A $10 MILLION USDA PROJECT THAT FEI LEADS IS TRAINING STUDENTS IN DIGITAL FORESTRY AND DEVELOPING DIGITAL TOOLS TO PROMOTE ECONOMIC RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY IN EASTERN U.S. FORESTS. view more 

CREDIT: PURDUE UNIVERSITY PHOTO/TOM CAMPBELL

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded a $10 million grant to Purdue University to help landowners and stakeholders better adapt their forests to increasingly complicated economic and climate conditions in the Eastern U.S.

About five million small, private landowners control just over half the acreage of forests in the Eastern U.S. This contrasts with Western U.S. forests, which are mostly publicly owned. Purdue and its project partners—the University of Georgia, the University of Maine and the U.S. Forest Service—aim to improve the management of 15 million acres of those forests, an area nearly as large as the state of West Virginia.

The project encompasses the northern hardwood forest in the Northeast, the central hardwood region, and the southern pine and mixed hardwood.

“We will provide the digital tools that allow rapid response and precision management to improve forest health,” said Songlin Fei, a professor of forestry and natural resources and the Dean’s Chair of Remote Sensing at Purdue.

Called PERSEUS (Promoting Economic Resilience and Sustainability of the Eastern U.S. Forests), the project invokes the hero of Greek mythology who slew the fearsomely snake-haired Gorgon Medusa. In its modern incarnation, PERSEUS will work to protect forestry’s many benefits, which include timber and fiber production along with climate mitigation. Their long-term sustainability, however, faces threats from climate change, evolving markets and land-use changes.

“The high interest in carbon has renewed interest in forest, while complicating their overall management,” said Aaron Weiskittel, the Irving Chair of Forest Ecosystem Management at the University of Maine. “PERSEUS will work to provide a more holistic approach to forest management, while giving landowners new tools to guide decision-making.”

Partner institutions will add to the depth of the research, applying digital tools and artificial intelligence to a variety of areas and forest types. Working together, the team will explore ways to merge data collected from drones, satellites and other sources in an AI environment to automate forest inventories. They will also help build systems to analyze ecosystem services provided by forests, as well as the environmental footprint of the forestry supply chain.

“We need to provide research, extension and outreach products to benefit private forest landowners of the Eastern United States,” said Pete Bettinger, the project lead at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “And we need to design systems that improve the efficiency of data development and the accessibility of information related to alternative management options.”

PERSEUS is part of Purdue’s cross-disciplinary Center for Digital Forestry, which includes faculty members from the colleges of Agriculture, Engineering, Science and Liberal Arts; Purdue Libraries; and the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. As one of the five strategic investments in Purdue’s Next Moves, the center leverages digital technology and multidisciplinary expertise to measure, monitor and manage urban and rural forests to maximize social, economic and ecological benefits.

PERSEUS will guide landowner decision-making via a digital framework for visually representing current and future forest trends so that landowners will have data upon which to base their decisions.

“You could manage the same patch of forest for timber, carbon, wildlife or for something else.  Opportunities also come and go,” said Fei, who also directs the Center for Digital Forestry.

“We will provide different economic and environmentally friendly scenarios about the most beneficial way of managing it. This modeling approach is not just on your 20 or 50 acres. It’s put into context of the broader region.”

If too many landowners in an area begin planting loblolly pine or walnut trees, for example, that could reduce the profitability of their operations.

PERSEUS will pursue engaged climate-smart management to ensure the project’s success.

“Any on-the-ground impact requires stakeholder involvement and adoption of the practices and tools we develop. That is why we will use a co-production model, meaning that we will design tools and practices that are co-conceived by and acceptable to landowners but are also economical and environmentally friendly,” Fei said.

The project also will enhance the Center for Digital Forestry’s ongoing efforts to produce a digitally competent next-generation workforce.

“This is the future,” Fei said. “If the U.S. agricultural sector wants to stay competitive, we will need to put a lot of energy into this area.”

Upcoming precision livestock farming conference to focus on field implementation

Producers offered discounted registration, vendor interactions

Meeting Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURE

 

IMAGE: THE 2023 U.S. PRECISION LIVESTOCK FARMING CONFERENCE WILL BE MAY 21-24, 2023, AT THE UT CONFERENCE CENTER IN KNOXVILLE. IMAGE COURTESY UTIA. view more 

CREDIT: UTIA

Livestock producers are encouraged to learn first hand about advances in precision livestock farming (PLF) by attending the second U.S. Precision Livestock Conference. Hosted by the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, the conference will be held in Knoxville and the agenda includes seminars, demonstrations, interaction with PLF providers and site tours.

Precision Livestock Farming involves the real-time monitoring of images, sounds and other biological, physiological and environmental parameters to assess and improve individual animal health and well-being within herd or flock production systems.

The conference will be May 21-24, 2023, at the UT Conference Center in Knoxville. The event will occur in-person, but participants may also choose to attend virtually.

In-person attendees will be treated to an optional tour of UTIA’s Johnson Research and Teaching Unit (JRTU) and the UT East Tennessee AgResearch Little River Animal and Environmental Unit. Participants will tour the animal research facility that houses an active poultry PLF research program. This tour will exhibit ongoing precision poultry research focused on animal management, environmental control and housing.  At “Little River,” participants will visit UT’s new, state-of-the-art dairy farm, nestled in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. The Little River unit is home to UT’s new Lely robotic milking systems. These systems run in parallel with conventional milkers, stimulating a wide range of research that can directly assess the value of PLF systems.

Attendees to the 2023 U.S. Precision Livestock Conference will exchange research discoveries, and the conference will foster collaboration among engineers, animal scientists, veterinarians, ethologists and other professionals as well as producers. UT AgResearch has formalized a PLF initiative to positively impact livestock and poultry production in Tennessee, the U.S. and beyond; and UT PLF Program Coordinator Robert Burns, distinguished professor of biosystems engineering, is serving as the conference chair. Yang Zhao, assistant professor of animal science, is conference proceedings chair, and Tami Brown-Brandl, professor of biological systems engineering a the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the program chair.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Sensors and Sensing in PLF 
• Data Management and Algorithm Development  
• Measuring, Modeling and Managing of Dynamic Responses 
• Societal Impacts of PLF

Commercial PLF systems and field application experiences will also be shared.

An opportunity for vendors to interact with attendees is also on the agenda. The opportunity to intereact with PLF providers will continue throughout the event in the main meeting foyer where breaks and receptions will be held.

For more information about the conference, including registration, please visit plf.tennessee.wedu/usplf2023/. Information about sponsorships and participating as a PLF vendor can be found online or by contacting Robert Burns at rburns@utk.edu.

The first U.S. Precision Livestock Conference was held in 2018 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Through its land-grant mission of research, teaching and extension, the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture touches lives and provides Real. Life. Solutions. utia.tennessee.edu.